Friday, March 10, 2017

Autopilot Verus Stick Shift--Campaign Edition

When I was younger, I didn’t have the shared experience of
playing similar adventures. I didn’t go to conventions, and for me, it was kind
of hard to “follow” how adventures worked. I was always afraid that there was
some perfect, magic way that they were to flow, and if I couldn’t do it exactly
so, I didn’t want to risk “doing it wrong.”

I’m not sure why the actual rules of the game were less
intimidating to me. I know I got things wrong when I was running D&D or Star Frontiers, but I only worried about “doing it wrong” when it
came to running published adventures.

Flash way forward to me being an adult, and coming back to
RPGs after having been away for years. While I loved creating my own campaigns,
my brain started trying to convince me that I would save time if I ran
published games.

I tried it a few times. I can’t help but tinker with
adventures as written now. I don’t so much worry about “doing it wrong,” and
instead, I need to put my fingerprints on it. So, I’ll swap out encounters, get
rid of the types of encounters I don’t like, look for alternate resolution
methods for aspects of the adventure I don’t love but don’t want to get rid of.

But I’ve noticed a weird thing happen when it comes to
running published adventures. I am way more likely to get thrown for a loop if
PCs do something off the beaten path in a published adventure than if they do
it in a campaign that I’m designing myself.

My campaign design theory is to look towards the end of a
longer arc and see what I want to have happen for a resolution, in broad terms,
and to see a few highlights that I want to have happen between the start of the
campaign and that resolution. I like having a “hook” for why the characters are
together and doing something. I don’t get too hung up on exactly what happens
between the beginning and the big resolution of the story arc.

If characters follow up on a lead that isn’t a lead, I’ll
look and see if the BBEG might have something going on logically in that
direction. I don’t go full Quantum Ogre. I just think about if it’s likely I
overlooked something that might logically be going on there, that might serve a
similar purpose to what’s going on in the other direction. If I can’t see
anything like that, then I have one of those “events” go off to show that the
BBEG is doing stuff to advance their goals, and the PCs kind of wandered into
an illegal cyber-cockfighting tournament that had nothing to do with the plot.

I have fun, and it seems to work, although I know there are
people better at both keeping a more focused campaign entertaining, and people
that can fully improv a campaign that turns out awesome. I’m neither of those,
and I’m just kind of okay at what I do.

What does all of this have to do with published adventures?
My brain doesn’t work the same way when I’m running published adventure as it
does when I’m running my own campaigns. If players go off the beaten path, I
have a harder time correcting for that behavior. I think my brain starts to run
on autopilot a little bit. That’s not to say I’m not engaged with the story, or
putting effort into it. But I’m not engaging the part of my brain that’s
constantly recalculating the living campaign world as it exists in my brain in
reaction to the players.

I’m noticing this a lot with my D&D Storm King’s Thunder game versus my Shadow of the Demon Lord game. I think everyone is having fun with Storm King’s Thunder, but right now, I’m
doing a lot of “running the encounter” and not modelling the world in my brain.
It’s fun, but it’s not as deep as engaging with other parts of my brain, and
while they “need” to do the things they are doing for the story, I’m not as
invested in personalizing things too much, because I want to get them to where
I think the fun parts of the adventure are.

In my Shadow of the
Demon Lord game, I’ve picked what the Shadow
of the Demon Lord is (the way the world will end if the PCs don’t stop it),
and I’ve seeded some NPCs from various factions around, but based on how the
players have latched onto on aspects of a session versus another, I’ve already
started to pivot from “this is the most obvious place to get this information”
to “these guys would have it as well,” and “if they never get it, I’m changing
this part to reflect it, and this session will deal with the fallout.”

Both groups are a lot of fun, and I have one person common
to both. I’m having fun with both. But running the Shadow of the Demon Lord game is reminding me that I’m missing
running campaigns of my own devising.

The most positive experience I can say that I have had with
both Pathfinder Society and D&D Adventurer’s League is that I now have that
shared experience of being able to discuss how different bands of adventurers
faced the same adventure. That’s a great feeling, and I’m glad I have it. And I
still like to read through published adventures, because I think it is
enormously valuable to see the way the designers expect the game to be played,
and even the ways they push the game out into different directions with
adventure design. But I’m thinking after Storm
King’s Thunder, I’m hanging up the published adventure hat for a while. Part
of my brain has been itching, and I just remembered how to scratch it.